by John Shirley
***
To infiltrate the domain of Cthulhu, to cross into Mu itself, was considered by the Hierarchy impossible. Braver Yithians than I had, after all, been killed the moment they set foot within Cthulhu’s domain, their presence revealed either via the scrutiny of automated probes or by Xothian sorcery. Any attempts to bombard or directly assault R’lyeh were catastrophic failures, wave after wave of our forces decimated before reaching even a few kilometers close to its shores. The Xothians were winning by virtue of their occult superiority. And no manner of ballistic advancement or even the greatest weapons available to our kind could give us an edge.
***
I lead the vessel across what appears to be thin air, its feet stepping on a trail of opaque stones invisible to its eyes. We move in the heights above R’lyeh, too small to be picked up by the eye of its citizens, too alien to be acknowledged by its defense systems. When a spawn of Dagon passes by, we hide in the shadow of great basalt pillars that reach up from the core of the planet into the heights above and continue, unseen.
***
It was baffling how the Hierarchy had not noticed the dent in R’lyeh defenses beforehand: when a group of captured polyps was translocated into the borders of Mu in the hope that the beasts would wreak some havoc in Cthulhu’s domain, the beasts were ignored by the defense systems, attacked only by waves of Dagon-Spawn and the lowliest servitors. The polyps killed many before they were finally driven back or destroyed, but the flaw had been made apparent:
R’lyeh’s most powerful defenses could not acknowledge what was not known to them.
***
Jumping onto a ledge set up above one of the factory-cathedrals, I check our surroundings. The distance to the fortress of Cthulhu is still considerable, but the displacement-bomb’s radius is great enough to achieve the desired effect without having to be set at ground zero. All we would have to do was make sure we remained unseen. Then I could escape from the vessel to safety moments before I was captured. The vessel would be sacrificed for the glory of the Race of Yith. It pained me how I could not make it understand the magnitude of the achievement it was about to perform.
My name is Robert Bendis, and I am to be Hell’s assassin, to deliver a blow to the Devil for the sake of his upstart kin it babbles on, perhaps abandoning itself to some primeval fantasy.
***
I proposed my plan to the Hierarchy: the idea of sending one of our kind within a vessel from the distant future of the planet, one that would be unknown to the Xothians. A creature whose anatomy and structure would place it among the vertebrate species, possessing some intelligence (though not fully aware, so as not to unintentionally notify the defense systems) and a limited capacity for handling Yithian interfaces. I volunteered to capture this creature myself, snatching it from the abode it had dwelt in, set in the middle of a green field infested with grass, beneath a blue sky. Its form had been frail, yet well-kept. It possessed opposable digits. Its brain immediately shut down as I assumed control and returned to my time.
***
Outside, something crashes against R’lyeh and the fortress shudders. Perhaps my people have mounted some sort of counter-attack, perhaps even using some of the higher-yield destructive weapons to breach the walls. It is possible they could have repelled the Dagon-spawn and set up some sort of counter-attack. I know that it is futile and I bet that the Hierarchy is aware of this as well. I am certain that, even now, they are abandoning their thought-forms, leaving the simple-minded beasts that are their vessels to perish in the bale-fire of R’lyeh’s retaliation. They are wise in their decision to flee. Where I am standing, all of R’lyeh is reverberating with the sound of collecting prayer, the droning of Cthulhu himself as he musters his faith-energy. The vessel’s hairs stand on end, agitated by the sensation of gathering power.
Satan is roaring from his Pit, rumbling and turning, roused from his place of rest. He speaks in tongues; perhaps he has caught a whiff of me. Hell wakens it says. The blow must be struck now it urges me on, perhaps driven by newfound courage born from desperation.
***
When I returned, I found that the war between Ponape and R’lyeh had progressed. In my days of absence, following the massive quake that had smashed the planet’s supercontinents into a gestalt, the cities of the Elder Things had been reduced to ruin. In the oceans of the Magnetic North, the world had spilled its bubbling life-blood and cooked the creatures in the confines of their own homes. Cthulhu had mobilized his forces, once the southern front of his war had been dealt with. Now, only Yith stood in the way of his absolute domination. This war had suddenly evolved from a millennia-long territorial dispute into full-fledged genocide.
***
We move, the vessel and I, in perfect harmony. It is spurred on by terror; I am driven by a desire to end this before my homeland is completely decimated. Halfway through our jump on a ledge, a spawn of Dagon screams its guttural cry and reaches out a taloned hand to grab us, taking a chunk of the vessel’s flesh with it. We crash onto the stone face of a building, grab on at the last minute and try to get up, only to find that the vessel’s right leg has ceased to function. A quick examination reveals that a tendon has been severed. The next jump will be impossible. Around and above us, the spawn of Dagon howl in alarm. From the balcony of a factory-cathedral, a Xothian flexes it tentacles and beats its wings, noticing us.
The craft which had transported us from the borders of Mu into R’lyeh itself was built according to the exact specifications taken from the vessel’s knowledge-base. It was a crude craft that required muscle power to move, but it had reached its target without incident. The vessel fought against me, of course, as fiercely as it does at this very moment, looking into the terrifying form of the Xothian that jumps from the balcony and flies toward us. We roll aside as the Xothian crashes into the stone, reducing it to powder. When the dust dies down, it roars and reaches out with its claws. The vessel strikes it with its fist and its arm comes clean off from the shoulder.
I am too weak, too frail, too little … it cries in its own head back at me, as it looks at the severed mess that has become its arm. It is paralyzed in fear, soiling itself, useless now, its fight-or-flight instincts clashing uselessly in the presence of the Xothian.
With its remaining hand, I remove the displacement-bomb. It won’t be anywhere near enough, but I can’t risk coming any closer. The vessel howls and screams, and I fight back, assuming control of its arm, pressing a sequence of buttons. I am jerked away moments before detonation. As I look down, I see the Xothian chewing on the vessel’s legs, crushing bone and rending flesh with its teeth. The defense-drones swarm around me.
I have a wife, Denise it drones on. Two children: Randolf and Millward. Randolf is six, Millward is eight … the vessel retreats back to its mantra, its own defense, blocking out the terror somewhat by weaving for itself a mental cocoon.
There is no chance to escape, so I fling the displacement-bomb down the parapet and into the depths. I see Cthulhu, turning its eyes to look down into me. The shock of witnessing his countenance kills my vessel, and I am trapped inside it, as the Xothian takes its final bite.
This is all a dream. I am lying on my bed and no one will wake me … I am safe, unhurt. I will open my eyes and won’t remember a thing.
Thankfully, I am aware in those final moments of the hum of the displacement-bomb as it goes off, collapsing space around it, ripping a chunk of R’lyeh’s life-sustaining machinery and a half-dozen of its factory cathedrals, sending them hurtling through Time and Space to destinations unknown. The gathering power dissipates. The city quakes, shudders, its walls and building covered in spider-web cracks. A torrent of obsidian rolls down into the impenetrable darkness. Something crashes through the obsidian face of R’lyeh and pours inside it, burning red-blue, as soon as its defenses collapse.
I perish, smiling.
THE SHAPE OF A SNAKE
BY CODY GOODFELLOW
I chanced to serve in war under one wh
o later became president of your country, although I came to no great understanding of his essential humanity. For, while our association in the field of battle was brief and unremarkable in itself, it is because of a brief and elsewhere unrecorded episode that I cannot recall the grinning face of the father of our regiment, but only an ecstatic, blind berserker hewing down friend and foe like so many saplings, his broad, rugged face a scarlet mask gleaming darkly with our blood.
In the hot, malarial week after the flag of truce had been delivered and terms were being discussed for the surrender of the city of Santiago, the lieutenant colonel of our regiment was forced on several occasions to hitch up a pack train and set out the coast to forage for such food and medicine as the US military failed to procure for her own soldiers. After his “crowded hour” atop San Juan Hill, he was jubilant and most energetic, even as the portion of his regiment not killed in the fighting succumbed to hunger and malaria.
So it was that eight officers, including Lt. DeVore and myself, accompanied Lt. Col. Roosevelt to the Hotel Cibola outside of Siboney, and the conspiracy of the Eternal Serpent.
The sergeant who led us there was a silver-haired, earless half-Comanche, a former cavalry scout and now bounty hunter, as far as one could get from the decorated polo players and tennis champions who crowded the upper echelons of our unit––the lieutenant colonel’s game but green friends from the Oyster Bay polo club and the Daniel Boone Society in New York. They looked at Sgt. Hull as if expecting a magic trick. Instead, he had offered them a beached freighter of unknown registry and an abandoned Spanish hotel, which was, despite its dilapidated state, lit up like Christmas and entertaining guests.
Stranded in the sweltering jungle hills above besieged Santiago, our only action since the battle atop El Caney had been to raid abandoned Spanish positions for supplies. Our principal adversary had not been the Spanish Empire, but the United States Army. The torturous crossing aboard the Yucatan, the catastrophe of poor planning, had reduced the Rough Riders from an elite cavalry regiment to a volunteer infantry unit and cut our numbers by more than the Spaniards ever would.
Alongside Lt. Col. Roosevelt, Sgt. Hull and myself, our foraging party included Captain Homer Helps, a former Texas Ranger; Captain Peter Kiesling, a crack shot and former Pony Express rider; Lt. Barnard Scovill, a polo champion, boxer and big game hunter; Lt. Truman Van Patten, a celebrated yachtsman and horse racer; and Sgt. Tom Heslop, a lifelong cavalry officer and veteran of the Indian Wars; and Lt. Hamilton DeVore, a veteran of countless Manhattan society scandals. Only our officers had kept their horses in the crossing, and so our pack train was a motley string of native mules and nags abandoned by the Spaniards.
Due to a contract I need not elaborate upon here, I was charged with the personal protection of young DeVore by his father, who had procured my contract in the usual way. I had accompanied him from New York to San Antonio to enlist in the volunteer cavalry regiment popularly known soon afterward as the Rough Riders. The same strings that insured the scion of the famously warlike DeVore clan a commission despite his inexperience in all things but sports and debauchery had also been pulled to speedily outfit the newly minted regiment so it could get to Cuba in time to see fighting, and likewise found no difficulty in placing me as Lieutenant DeVore’s Master Sergeant.
“Not a hair on his head shall come to harm,” the elder DeVore had commanded. “Do not,” his mother added, “allow those Spanish bastards to touch him.” I could have advised them that the heartfelt yet vague idiomatic terms of the contract would lead to grief later on, if ordered to do so.
Roosevelt knew DeVore’s older brother tolerably well from philanthropic jaunts and hunting expeditions in the wilds of upstate New York and Canada. It stung young Hamilton that he hadn’t ranked high enough to sit in a staff tent and toast a map with planter’s punch, but neither the tropics nor life as a troop commander had suited him so far, though he was loath to desecrate the family name. There was no shame in defeat and death in such families; only in failing duty.
Roosevelt cut a fine figure, almost crackling with the sound of history bending to his will. While half the regiment was down with malaria, and yellow fever hysteria ran rampant, he’d shed twenty pounds and was a picture of obscenely robust vigor. He suffered a few splinters in his eyebrow and a welt on his wrist the size of a robin’s egg from an ingot of artillery shrapnel. Two enlisted men close beside him were filleted by the same shell. When McKinley had finally acceded to Hearst’s hounding and declared war on Spain, his masthead crowed HOW DO YOU LIKE THE JOURNAL’S WAR? But no one who knew anything about it could argue but that destiny and Mr. Roosevelt had fought with equal fervor to meet here, in this place, for his war.
I strenuously avoided such men, unless contractually compelled to serve. Though I shrank from his notice at every turn, he seemed to seek out in the men of violence with which he’d surrounded himself—some mirror of his own imminent transformation.
Fortunately, he fastened upon Sgt. Hull. At some point in their lopsided conversation, Roosevelt said, “I have bested men in athletic competition, and I have stalked and killed all manner of wild game. I find it quite difficult not to look to those experiences when reflecting on the excitement of the battlefield.”
“I think you’ve just found the reason for sports,” DeVore interjected, but a snapping glance from the Colonel shut him off.
“Killing men is nothing,” Hull said. “Any cornered man or beast can kill. But to send men into battle …”
“I ask nothing of any man I would not myself undertake, Sergeant.” The soft brevity of his tone was the only hint of his fraying temper.
“A man who can send others to their death without feeling it is a monster.…”
“But a man who would balk at saving millions for the sake of a few able young men who know the wages of the game …”
“The game,” Hull growled, “is what men like you call other people’s lives.”
Roosevelt tensed so that his horse balked on the trail. “Indeed, and millions of lives, indeed the whole world, in the balance. The Spaniard must be driven from the Western World. The days of his empire are over.”
And ours have only begun, I didn’t say, for it wasn’t my place.
Roosevelt ordered Hull to return to camp and report to Col. Wood, then impatiently rode ahead to the water.
The ship was as Hull had described it. It looked unlikely to have sailed to Cuba under its own power, and less likely ever to leave. Beached, scuttled and rusted through, her superstructure was encrusted with barnacles and stranger things that had burst with the rigor of being lifted from the ocean bottom.
And yet the name of the vessel stood out in white paint upon its broken prow––Nykøbing. Roosevelt was ignorant of its derivation. A Danish clipper ship, I whispered to DeVore, lost in the North Atlantic between Godthab in Greenland and Copenhagen ten years before. He repeated this to garner an appreciative glance from the Colonel. We could only conclude that it was not here at all when our convoy landed near Daiquiri.
Not far from the lagoon, we crossed a broad, overgrown lawn decorated with strutting peacocks and headless statuary, and soon came within sight of the sprawling ruin of the Hotel Cibola.
The scabrous whitewash and brick façade of the hotel had all but returned to the jungle, but the saloon within was brightly lit, and two rows of fine carriages were lined up before the stables. Roosevelt dismounted from Little Texas beneath a tree a hundred yards from the wide front porch. Heslop was ordered to remain on guard and ready to ride at a moment’s notice. Hitching up his Sam Browne belt and kicking his cavalry saber in its cumbersome scabbard out from between his legs, he strolled up the front steps and threw wide the doors.
The vast expanse of marble floor was furnished with scattered tables and chairs. The gambling tables were shrouded, but a small crowd was gathered in the vestibule as if awaiting some terribly urgent message. A quartet of musicians played in tandem on an enormous marimba in an alcove, obliv
ious, for they were all blindfolded in order not to see their clientele.
Roosevelt grinned broadly and raised his hands to signal his peaceful intent. “Gentleman and dear ladies, I implore you not to panic. I know not where your sympathies lie in the current conflict, but I most emphatically assure you that our attentions are peaceful.…”
Eleven men and two women studied us with varying degrees of fear, loathing and longing. I had seen similar faces in opium dens and on murderer’s row in any number of jails. Three Celestials with braided queues that reached the floor smiled inscrutably over steepled hands; a Hindoo fakir swaddled in the seemingly endless length of his own beard sat opposite them, chewing betel nuts and staring fixedly and unblinkingly at our commander. A tonsured scholar in the robes of some disavowed Catholic order glared at elaborate cabalistic calculations in chalk upon his tablecloth. A fair-haired identical twin brother and sister stood at the bar, decked out like antebellum plantation owners awaiting a slave auction. An ancient Prussian officer in a uniform festooned with every conceivable military honor quivered in a wheelchair pushed by a dead-eyed bulldog with a long scar running from his scalp to his jaw through one white, unseeing eye. A blind man in an undertaker’s black worsted wool suit sat against the wall with one hand cupped against the mahogany wall clock, nodding approvingly in time with the music. And on the edge of the gathering, a pale, worried young woman in the uniform of an American Gibson Girl gnawed at her thumb and blinked some desperate telegraphic message.
